It's extraordinarily difficult to find "official" (non-WN) recognition of the fact that people are locked up in many parts of Europe for "denying" (e.g. revising, questioning, or denying) the Jewish holocaust. I figured I'd start a thread and post the sources I have.

While he is currently on trial for public incitement and has been convicted of publicly condoning criminal activities (last year he was fined several thousand euros for publicly supporting the 9/11 terrorist attacks), Mahler has been able to keep his website from being banned by carefully parsing his words so that they do not violate Germany’s laws against racial incitement, Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial. For instance, Mahler will not explicitly deny the Holocaust, but will instead say that it was an insignificant or irrelevant event (or even a necessary event in the evolution of the historical Will).

Important steps have been taken to combat this misinformation. In some countries Holocaust denial has been made illegal and those who perpetuate it are punished. Many Holocaust museums have been established, and Holocaust education has been instituted in many schools—in order to ensure that, despite the efforts of deniers, it will never happen again.

France, Belgium and Germany among other countries have laws that make denial of the Holocaust a criminal offence. Denying the existence of God may be worthy of punishment, but are we so attached to the Holocaust that we want to give it the same treatment?

Countries such as Germany and Austria have crimes such as denying the Holocaust which have no equivalent in Britain. Under current laws, if a British citizen committed this offence in Germany and returned to the UK, he could not be extradited.
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Holocaust denial laws are in place in seven EU countries but they would be a big departure for Britain, where a risk of fomenting public disorder is needed before a thought becomes a crime.

A German historian who claimed that Auschwitz prisoners enjoyed cinemas, a swimming pool and brothels was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

The Labour leader said he saw a "very strong case" for making it illegal to say that Hitler's extermination of six million Jews did not take place. Opening an exhibition dedicated to Anne Frank, Mr Blair pledged that a Labour government would give "active consideration" towards legislation.

His comments came as a cross-party backbench Bill to create an offence of Holocaust denial cleared its first Commons hurdle. The Bill, introduced by Mike Gapes, Labour MP for Ilford South, received an unopposed First Reading but lack of Commons time means it is unlikely to pass into law. The Bill could lead to the imprisonment of those who publish material denying the existence of the death camps.

Mr Gapes said there was a loophole in the law which banned material likely to incite racial violence or hatred because no one had been prosecuted for debying the Holocaust. He said: "We are told that though this material is offensive it is not insulting." He said there were laws against Holocaust denial in many other nations, and rejected criticism that the move infringed free speech.

Holocaust denial committed overseas would be an offense under Israeli legal jurisdiction and serve as grounds for extradition under legislation that is expected to pass a first reading in the Knesset this week.

Under German law, the publication of Holocaust denials and similar material is considered to incite racial and ethnic hatred and is therefore illegal. In the past, Germany has ordered Internet service providers to block access to US Web sites that post revisionist literature.

France has similar laws, which allowed a student anti-racism group to successfully sue Yahoo! in a Paris court for allowing Third Reich memorabilia and Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to be sold on the company's auction sites. In November 2001, a US judge ruled that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech protects Yahoo! from liability.

Quote:

Banned from Google.de and Google.fr listings is Stormfront.org, one of the Internet's most popular "white pride" sites. Stormfront features discussion areas, a library of white nationalist articles, and essays by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

"We've been dealing with this for quite a few years," said Don Black, who runs the site. "The German police agencies seem obsessed with Stormfront even though we're not focussed on any German language material."

Black, who learned a few months ago that Google.de delisted Stormfront, says he doesn't hold it against the Mountain View, California-based company. "Google is trying to conform to their outrageous laws," Black said. "So there's really nothing we can do about it. It's really a French and German issue rather than a Google issue."

BUDAPEST, Hungary - Hungary plans to make denial of the Holocaust a crime, the foreign minister said Monday.

The proposal is part of a wider government review of the penal code in an effort to make laws against hate crimes and racially motivated crimes more effective.

"The objective of the modification is to close the legal loopholes used by those making anti-Semitic statements," Foreign Minister Laszlo Kovacs told a news conference.
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"This is also against anti-Gypsy and xenophobic expressions. I would like Hungarian democracy not to be distorted by such statements," Kovacs added. [Paging George Orwell...Paging George Orwell...please come to the red courtesy phone...]
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Kovacs said Germany and Austria have laws which make denial of the Holocaust a crime.

"So maybe it is not a coincidence that Hungary is in the range of countries, where even today there is a need for" such a law, Kovacs said.

BRITAIN is opposing European moves to make denying or trivialising Nazi atrocities a criminal offence.
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An offence of "public denial or trivialisation of the crimes dealt with by the international military tribunal established in 1945" is also proposed.

Holocaust denial laws are in place in seven countries, including Germany, France and Austria. But they would be a big departure for Britain, where a risk of fomenting public disorder is needed before a thought becomes a crime.
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The proposals need the unanimous support of the 15 states, so Britain can veto them if further negotiations fail to meet its objections. There have been several prosecutions in Europe in the past few years for holocaust denial.

In Germany a historian who claimed that Auschwitz prisoners enjoyed cinemas, a swimming pool and brothels was sentenced to 10 months in jail; and an American served three years of a four-year sentence for distributing anti-holocaust material.

In 1991 the controversial historian David Irving, who lost a High Court libel action two years ago, was fined by a German court for breaking holocaust denial laws and "defaming the memory of the dead".

I'm always struck by the fact that governments are not required to and do not make explicit their own laws. Might it not be a good idea for everyone to set forward what is and is not legal? Might it not be good for governments to inform tourists and immigrants what is and is not permissable in their territories? Is an American tourist supposed to just somehow know that speech is not free in Germany, and that he cannot legally deny the Jewish holocaust in public or in print?

This is all casting aside for a moment the idea that governments have a duty to tell their own citizens just what the rules are; think about strangers like tourists - how are they expected to have the same common knowledge that natives have?

(Sorry, I like to give credit where due but I closed the thread tab and I can't remember who mentioned Horst Mahler, whom I knew nothing about, and led me to find the article at JewishPress.com.)

These denial laws are simply incredible. People have been so blinded and brainwashed by the mainstream media that even when something like this is brought to their attention they just brush it off.

Well, since America has no such laws there is not much an American can do about them. Europe apparantly has little history of personal freedom - this include gun ownership and free speech. However, you'll find that the European press has no problem condemning Israel and that European countries regulalry vote against Israel at the UN.

Well, since America has no such laws there is not much an American can do about them. Europe apparantly has little history of personal freedom - this include gun ownership and free speech. However, you'll find that the European press has no problem condemning Israel and that European countries regulalry vote against Israel at the UN.

groups like the adl have been gnawing at our free speech laws for years- condisering the adl actively and aggressively supports these laws in other coutnries its safe to assume the jewish elite will push for these laws here. Its really a secularization of jewish law...that no goy shall dare criticize jews....